JC: Well I came back as CEO in February last year and my perception of the whole market changed quite a lot.

The PIE: How much time did you take away from the business?

JC: Kind of five years- I wasn’t actually very much away, I was less than part-time. But my perception of what the student market is has changed – you don’t organise student affairs anymore, you organise something linked to education and lifestyle. We help create global access through education.

The market is more sophisticated nowadays, so you can’t actually only be with a catalogue where we have ‘this school here, and this..’ You have to talk about destination and lifestyle, better understand student ambitions.

The PIE: How has this changed STB?

JC: We created new departments in our company, like university counselling for people thinking about applying to American or Canadian or British universities – they don’t have the means to do it so they are sometimes too late on the application. They don’t understand the systems, so we decided to create this department I think 8 months ago and its already flourishing.

“We have created a timeline that starts from when you’re 10 and goes until you are 60, 65 or 70”

We have GATE [an event and forum] which means we can deliver a mixture of lectures to students and at the event, we host 93 different companies, including 25 universities. Among them we have Dartmouth, the Ivy Leagues, Columbia, University of Texas, University of California.

The PIE: Do you think that is that how you think agencies will continue to succeed, by taking a real holistic view of student needs? 

JC: Yes, we have created a timeline that starts from when you’re 10 and goes until you are 60, 65 or 70. We have customers that go for cooking school, art school, family programmes, etc. Our staff are being trained 30 days a month, 20 people per day. Some of them stay for 15 days and some may stay for workshops of two- or three-days only.

The GATE concept enables students to talk directly with STB partner schools and listen to guest speakers

To do that the university counselling, staff need training, and training- so it’s a lot of investment. So I don’t know whether all other companies will be prepared to put the money into creating this.

The PIE: You were talking yesterday on the [IALC] panel about independent schools versus chain schools and how you sell various programmes across your 70 offices. What is the benefit of both types of school?

JC: Well, let me put it this way. The advantages of the chain is that they’re big. They serve in many different countries and many different cities. They have a marketing budget that is quite substantial. For the consultants, from our consultants – you open one brochure, you know the system, (like ELS or Kaplan) as they have all the same structure for schools in England or New York so it is easier for them.

“For the consultants, from our consultants – you open one brochure, you know the system”

With smaller ones, it’s different; the relationships are different. When your staff is knowledgeable about the boutique schools, that’s what I like. When my staff learn then they often prefer the boutique schools. And, maybe because a lot of the competitors don’t know how to sell the boutique schools.

Something detrimental to the marketplace is discounting.. If we offer clients a chain school in London, [a rival agency might say], “Oh, I have the contract as well so I’ll give you $100 discount and STB isn’t going to give you that”. You can’t discount and pay high salaries so how am I going to discount everything I do?

The PIE: That’s really interesting. So tell me a bit about STB and how it started; because it’s one of the biggest agencies in the world.

JC: Well, in fact I bought it. STB was created in ’71 by an English teacher who decided to send some kids to the UK. I was at university at that time. So I bought some products from STB for my colleagues at the university. And then the owner offered it to me and I bought it. At that time I had five people working, and one office. That’s how it started. And then from then on, I started to diversify the other offices and products and so on.

STB in Brazil now is very unique actually in a company because we have a lot of products linked to the market that nobody else has. So, we have the ISIC student card for example that’s really important for the students that are travelling. We have products such as Contiki for example and we are the only guys that sell it. We operate work and travel programmes; we are the official, exclusive representatives for the Walt Disney programmes and Brazil will send 1,000 kids to Disney every year. Then we create the university counselling as well and then the Global Citizenship programmes are fantastic.

The PIE: Which companies are offering Global Citizenship?

JC: Where There Be Dragons, for example.

The PIE: I don’t really know them.

JC: They’re fantastic, Princeton buys an enormous number of progammes from them. So, we started to see Dragons’ activity as well. My son is among the first, we are sending 10 kids now and they’re all going into different programmes. There’s 12 kids in the programme, and for every four kids you have one tutor. This guy has either a Master’s degree or a PhD. So they have six weeks in China, they stay in Buddhist temples, they stay in Chinese houses, they do volunteer programmes.

“They have six weeks in China, they stay in Buddhist temples, they stay in Chinese houses, they do volunteer programmes”

This kind of programme really opens minds; we are always searching for these programmes and Dragons is one of them. People are learning more and more in their country so they want different kind of programmes when they travel abroad.

The traditional language schools are not organising this. They have the market in their hands – imagine that – but they’re leaving this customer in the same kind of location and environment for other companies to come in and take ownership of them. Maybe it’s difficult for them to create something like that, but it is the same market.

The PIE: How do you manage to stay on the cutting edge of what students want?

JC: We are always innovating, we change the communication style.. We changed the layout of our offices, we have 10 offices now with a completely different layout. It is very expensive to change all of them so we have three years down the road to change them.

The PIE: So, tell me- what’s the new layout and how is it better?

JC: The offices used to be like regular offices – pictures of people studying, New York here, tourist hell there- you know all these icons that we get from the cities and people laughing. We decided to go more to an aspirational part so we decided to bring the idea of New York lofts as a living space to our offices. It’s more provocative. People are really liking it.

The PIE: And you have your own app too don’t you?

JC: TripBox is now a 100% functional – it’s fantastic! All essential travel information and bookings are stored and can be imported to a computer. So, imagine yourself – you book a language programme, you need for example the address of your family. So, you go through the TripBox.

“We are close to 70,000 I think”

Then you have an area that I call ‘Insider Tips’. And then we have the Yellow Pages: “Where do I find a dentist? And then you have virtual safe for your documents – passports, copies of everything and the system, it informs you when documentation, visas are about to expire.

The PIE: How many students do you send overseas?

JC: I think for language programmes probably 30,000, something like this.

The PIE: What about your whole footprint?

JC: In terms of ticketing and Contiki and accommodation etc., we are close to 70,000 I think.

The PIE: So tell me how you like to relax with you’re not innovating? 

JC: I collect wine and I’ve been collecting it for 20 years so I go to auctions and I have somebody taking care of my collection. I do participate in auctions all the time, I put some in auctions and I buy again. This is very fun, I love it and I think it’s something that really puts my mind out of the business side. Also, I’m a pilot so I fly the Cirrus, the one with the parachute, four seats, it’s a pretty nice plane. So that’s what I do when I’m out.

The PIE: Amazing. I’m also interested, how much of your time when you are working do you spend on  ‘blue sky thinking?’ Because you’re an ideas man, I can see that. 

JC: A lot. I’m always thinking about something different. I speak to a lot of people. I speak to my kids and they started to travel when they were 11, so they’ve been to all the summer programmes.